The Dahesh Museum owns a significant collection of works by the extraordinary Bonheur family, especially paintings, drawings and sculptures by Rosa. The Musée des Beaux-Arts in Bordeaux, in collaboration with the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, is marking the centenary of her birth with a large retrospective exhibition, and has requested three works from the Dahesh collection. The French museums’ stated aim is to reappraise her art and allow the rediscovery of her work beyond biographical clichés.
In 1997, Bordeaux organized an earlier survey of her work (that city is her hometown) and requested loans from the Dahesh, then proposed a continuation of the exhibition at the then three-year-old New York museum. Rosa Bonheur: All Nature’s Children opened on December 17, 1997, to excellent reviews. It was not possible to replicate the Bordeaux exhibition, but it did include significant works from France, supplemented by American loans—including a splendid painting of a lioness from the board room of the Bronx Zoo! Visitors familiar with our space in 1997 will understand that the Metropolitan Museum’s masterpiece, The Horse Fair, would not fit, but the Dahesh did own and exhibit a very rare work, her brother Isidore Bonheur’s bronze relief cast after The Horse Fair as well as a number of studies for that great painting.
A fully illustrated catalogue documented the exhibition (see publications). It includes a biographical chronology and essays by distinguished scholars Gabriel Weisberg, Annie-Paule Quinsac, Helène Lafont-Couturier, and Britta C. Dwyer. Dahesh Assistant Curator Cristina Portell wrote a sterling survey of the talented Bonheur family, including father (and teacher) Raymond and siblings Rosa, Isidore, Auguste, and Juliette.
Following its presentation in Bordeaux, the exhibition will be on view at the Musée d’Orsay from October 17, 2022, until January 15, 2023.